NASA is going back to the Moon! We’ll follow the crew of Artemis II every step of the way.
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TinyGo Boldly Goes Where No Go Ever Did Go Before
When you’re programming microcontrollers, you’re likely to think in C if you’re old-school, Rust if you’re trendy, or Python if you want it done quick and have resources to spare. What about Go? The programming language, not the game. That’s an option, too, with TinyGo now supporting over 100 different dev boards, along with webASM.
We covered TinyGo back in 2019, but they were just getting started at that point, targeting the Arduino and BBC:micro boards. They’ve grown that list to include everything from most of Adafruit’s fruitful suite of offerings, ESP32s, and even the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. So now you can go program go in Go so you can play go on the go.
The biggest drawback–which is going to be an absolute dealkiller for a lot of applications–is a lack of wireless connectivity support. Claiming to support the ESP8266 while not allowing one to use wifi is a bit of a stretch, considering that’s the whole raison d’être of that particular chip, but it’s usable as a regular microcontroller at least.
They’ve now implemented garbage collection, a selling point for those who like Go, but admit it’s slower in TinyGo compared to its larger cousin and won’t work on AVR chips or in WebAssembly. It’s still not complete Go, however, so just as we reported in 2019, you won’t be able to compile all the standard library packages you might be used to. There are more of them than there were, so progress has been made!
Still, knowing how people get about programming languages, this will please the Go fanatics out there. Others might prefer to go FORTH and program their Arduinos, or to wear out their parentheses keys with LISP. The more the merrier, we say!
Magnetic Levitation Using An Induction Cooktop
Adding another item on the list of things you probably shouldn’t be trying at home, we got [Brainiac75] giving magnetic levitation a shot using an unmodified induction cooktop and aluminium foil. Although not ferromagnetic, it turns out that aluminium can be made to do interesting things in the magnetic field created by the powerful electromagnet that underlies the induction principle.
Interestingly, although there’s a detection circuit in these units that should detect the presence of an appropriate (ferromagnetic) object, it appears that even a thin sheet of aluminium foil can completely deceive it. The effect is that of a force pushing the foil away from the cooktop’s surface, with foil areas that remain close enough to the ferrite bars on the electromagnet even heating up enough to begin melting the aluminium.
After a bit of fun with various shapes and types of aluminium objects, the video moves on to a scientific explanation of what’s going on. The surface resistivity of the foil is similar enough to ferromagnetic cookware that it fools the sensor, after which the skin effect of aluminium induces a current. This then does the typical Lorentz force things.
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2026 Hackaday Europe: First Round Of Speakers Announced!
Hackaday Europe is the continental version of the Ultimate Hardware Conference, taking place May 16th and 17th, and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops over the next couple weeks, because we got so many more great talks than we had anticipated that we’re negotiating for extra time.
This year, we’re moving to a new venue in Lecco, Italy, and it’s sure to be fantastic. Get your tickets now before it’s too late. And stay tuned for another round of talk reveals next week!
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Thermostat? Do It With A 555!
It is a running gag around here that whenever a project posts, someone will inevitably point out that it could have been done with a 555 timer IC. [Stephen Woodward] went the opposite way and built a simple thermostat using the ubiquitous chip.
To be fair, this isn’t some sophisticated PID controller — it’s basically a bang-bang controller. Since the device has a comparator and the circuits use a thermistor, it seems like a clever but simple idea on the surface. However, there are some neat tricks. For example, if you tie the 555 threshold pin to Vdd, then the trigger pin acts as an inverting analog comparator. Another nice feature: the setpoint depends on a resistance ratio, so there is no need for a precise input voltage reference.
A simple circuit change can switch the circuit to power a heater or a cooler. The chip can handle a surprising amount of power, but for some applications, you may need some output drive circuitry. The simple circuit even has hysteresis, which you can set with a different resistor. Pretty impressive for a cheap chip, two resistors, a thermistor, and a battery.
We’ve seen a lot of strange 555 circuits in our contests. We even had a 555 Timer Contest.
CCA Ethernet Cables: Not Up To Scratch, But Are They Dangerous?
If you’ve ever bought a suspiciously cheap Ethernet cable from an online listing, there’s a decent chance you’ve encountered Copper Clad Aluminum. Better known as CCA, it’s exactly what it sounds like—an aluminium conductor with a thin skin of copper deposited on the outside. Externally, cables made with this material look largely like any other, with perhaps the only obvious tell being that they feel somewhat lighter in the hand.
CCA is cheaper than proper copper cabling, and it conducts signals well enough to function in an Ethernet cable. And yet, it’s a prime example of corner-cutting that keeps standards bodies and professional installers up at night. But just how dangerous is this silent scourge, found lurking in so many network cabinets around the world?
Not Up To Scratch
Everything you need to know about CCA is in the name—it refers to an aluminium wire with a thin copper cladding, typically applied through a die extrusion process. The reasoning behind this exploits a real physical phenomenon called the skin effect, wherein higher-frequency AC signals tend to travel along the outer surface of a conductor. The idea goes that since most of the current moves through the outer copper skin layer anyway, the less-conductive aluminium core doesn’t unduly impact the wire’s performance. Using copper-clad aluminium wiring is, in theory, desirable because aluminium is much cheaper than copper, which can really add up over long cable runs. Imagine you’re wiring a building with with hundreds of miles of Ethernet cabling, all with eight conductors each—the savings add up pretty quickly.
There’s a problem with CCA cabling in these contexts, though. Due to prevailing cabling standards, any cable made with CCA is technically not even a real Ethernet cable at all. The relevant documents are unambiguous.
ANSI/TIA-568.2-D requires conductors in Category-rated cable to be solid or stranded copper. No other materials are acceptable, and thus CCA is explicitly excluded from use in Category cable applications. A cable with CCA conductors cannot legitimately carry a Cat5e, Cat6, or any related designation under any circumstances. Similarly, ISO/IEC 11801 has the same requirement. The U.S. National Electrical Code also states that conductors in communications cables, other than coaxial cable, shall be copper. This isn’t a suggestion or a best practice; it’s the letter of the code. Anything lesser is simply not allowed. Continue reading “CCA Ethernet Cables: Not Up To Scratch, But Are They Dangerous?”
The Heat Island Effect Is Warming Up The AI Data Center Controversy
There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled in environmental circles about the cooling water requirements of data centers, but less consideration of what happens with all the heat coming out of these buildings. Naturally, it’s going to warm the surrounding environment, but how much? Around 2 C (3.6 F) on average, and potentially much more than that, according to a recent study on the data heat island effect.
It’s common sense, of course: heat removed from the data center doesn’t go away. That heat might go into a body of water if one is available, but otherwise it’s out into the atmosphere to warm up everybody else’s day. In some places — like a Canadian winter — that might not be so bad. In others, where climate change and urban heat islands are cranking up the summertime temperatures, it very much could be. Especially if you’re in the worst-case scenario micro-climate described by the paper, which saw a predicted increase of 9.1 C (16 F).
Now, these results are theoretical and need to be ground-truthed, but anyone who has huddled next to the air-exchange unit of a large building for warmth knows there’s something to them. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be before-and-after measurements available for existing data-centers — AI or otherwise — to show exactly what their heat output is doing in the real world, but the urban heat island effect from all the dark asphalt in our cities is well known. Cooling paint and green roofs can help with that, but they won’t do much for the megawatts being pumped out to keep your cousin’s AI girlfriend online.
Some would argue that all this heat wouldn’t be a problem if we could launch the data centers outside the environment — just have a care the front doesn’t fall off.
934 MHz: When The Government Really Doesn’t Want You To Have CB
In the mid 1970s there were a spate of movies depicting the romance and lifestyle of truck drivers in the southern half of the United States. Over on the other side of the Atlantic these were naturally received not as works of drama but as documentaries, and thus began a craze for British drivers to do up their Ford Capri so in the right light and with your eyes nearly closed, it almost looked like Burt Reynolds’ Pontiac Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit.
Such a fine automobile was of course incomplete without a CB radio, highly illegal at the time, which led to an underground CB craze and its eventual legalization in 1981. [Ringway Manchester] is here with a tale from that era, of 934 MHz CB, an odd and underused allocation that was eventually phased out for commercial services.
When UK CB was eventually legalized by the government, it was very obvious that they really didn’t want to. Brits got 27 MHz as FM only with meager power and a weird set of frequencies that nobody else had, and a second band way up in the UHF range, at 934 MHz. We remember they originally tried to make a UHF band the only allocation on purpose because it was nearly useless for mobile operation, and Brits only got 27 MHz by fighting back in the political lobbying space.
The video below tells the story of the band, with relatively scarce and expensive equipment leading to it being an exclusive band more similar to the amateur bands, with little resemblance to its raucous 27 MHz counterpart. How much activity there was depended very much on where in the country you were, which of course wasn’t where your Hackaday scribe was as a teenager even if it had been affordable. Eventually the government saw the little flashing pound signs and grabbed it back for a mobile radio service that never materialized, and now the frequencies are part of the mobile phone spectrum.
Have a watch for an odd bit of UK radio nostalgia and some 2020s illegal CB’ers, and if you want more it’s a subject we’ve touched on before.
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